Randy White

[Correctional Service Canada, February 12th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the warden of Kingston prison suspended a guard for passing Paul Bernardo a copy of Maxim magazine, that is a men's magazine, because he said it contravened the policy that disallows it. The policy states, “sexually oriented material which promotes or encourages any form of a criminal act...”

Does the Solicitor General agree that this suspension was warranted and does the policy actually prevent potential criminal acts?

[Criminal Code, January 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, if I am out of time I will address the last question, because judge made law is a particular pet peeve of mine.

The law of this nation ought to be made in this place, not in the courtrooms of our country. Time and time again we see obscure judges changing the laws and it is wrong. Pornography fits into that, the definition of marriage, the right of prisoners to vote and on it goes. One reason we do not see lobbyists that much any more in our offices is because they do not have to go to the backbench Liberals or to the people on the opposition side. They go as witnesses to court cases. One problem in the country is there are too many judge made laws. Parliament has to take back its right to legislate and to make laws.

[Criminal Code, January 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the problem with supporting government legislation is that this happens. Our pollsters say that the Liberals are predictable and I would say that is very accurate. I have been here for at least 10 years. Most legislation that has come through the House has addressed in part some very serious issues. It has addressed in part the solution and in other parts, where the Liberals will not go, it can actually destroy the legislation in effect. This half and half legislation is where our country is having problems these days. It makes great work in the courtrooms for judges and lawyers, but it does nothing for the victims of crime.

One has to look at our value system and our principles. If legislation comes through the House of Commons which has serious flaws, like not addressing the age of sexual consent and allowing sex offenders to get away with conditional sentences, then we have to stand up and say that until the legislation is where we want it, we cannot agree with it.

I really dislike the rhetoric that often comes from the other side that if we defeat or vote against a piece of legislation we do not want it. In most cases there are some serious flaws in the legislation and things that are wanting in the legislation. That is when people stand up and say that until all of it is in there, they cannot vote for it. That is where I stand.

There are serious things missing from this legislation, as much as I would like to see it passed. It is just the same as the intended legislation for the national sex offender registry, which I wrote initially. In that legislation, which came before the House of Commons, were two very serious flaws.

I stand here and say we want it, but we do not want it half-baked. Therein lies the problem. Those who stand on principle should vote against it and those who stand in between middle and mediocre, as the Liberals do in the political spectrum, can vote for it.

[Criminal Code, January 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Bill C-20 because it is legislation in which I have been intimately involved during my complete career in politics. Today I still spend a lot of time at it.

In my opinion the country has a very serious moral and ethical crisis on its hands. There are issues which come forward in our court system today where by and large obscure judges, wherever they are, make decisions that are case precedent and are used right across the country. Those decisions tend more and more to go to the libertarian type of viewpoint. Many Canadians are very concerned where this moral and ethical viewpoint is going.

I can only cite a few of them now. There were original decisions on pornography that it would be okay to possess some but not to produce it. How on earth can some obscure judge appreciate how one could possess some pornography but not produce it? It does not even make sense for these guys to be deliberating on it and making these decisions.

The age of sexual consent is another one of these considerations. It is not in the bill but it should be. The age of sexual consent still remains at too low. I have been involved in cases, and I still am, where we have to remove very young people, 14 and 15 year olds, from crack houses. Police officers basically say that they cannot do much about it because they are probably consenting to stay with 30 and 40 year olds. These 30 and 40 year olds use them for prostitution, for their own sexual activities and to sell drugs, yet they are allowed to be in those houses.

In one particular case in which I was involved, the welfare people said to send her down and they would give her some money. That is a lot of damned good. We have to raise the age of sexual consent. That is a basic fundamental premise of our need to look after younger people today but we are not doing that.

There are other issues that I do not want to raise here because the particular exploitive issue of children is more important. However I see moral and ethical standards issues when the government does not challenge things like the definition of marriage, which comes from some obscure judge.

We have the issue of conditional sentences. I do not know why the government did not come forward and say that it would forbid conditional sentences to be used in the case of sex crimes, whether exploitive of children or others. I am not a lawyer but I get involved in these cases where individuals are given conditional sentences. They are told to say they are sorry and to go home. They do not spend a damned day in jail for the serious sex crimes they have undertaken. There is something wrong with that philosophy. The case of exploitive sex crimes against children should be prominent in the legislation, not missing.

In this legislation the government fails. The proposal to increase the maximum sentence is not the problem. The problem is that when we go into the courtrooms today for sex, drug and related crimes, which some of them are, the judges are working at too low a level.

There are only two things wrong with the justice system and it is judges and lawyers. The lawyers are looking for the lowest common denominator as a defence lawyer for their clients. Many times crown prosecutors are ill-prepared or not prepared by way of experience and the judge goes for the lowest common denominator as well. In other words, the problem with this legislation is the minimum sentence is too low, not the maximum.

These are common sense problems today. They are problems that can be overcome quite easily if it was not for this polarization of political views in the country. The government would be well advised to spend some time sitting down with the opposition members, not in polarized committees, and trying to get the understanding of the people who they represent, not just the people who the Liberals represent.

What is the answer? What we have today is a declining moral and ethical standard I believe of a government and a declining moral and ethical standard within the courtrooms. All the legislation that we produce in this place will not replace what is going on in those courtrooms and in the political backrooms of the country.

What parents are looking for is some rationale, some punishment and some rehabilitation. The rehabilitation while one is in prison is another problem again which has to be linked with this kind of legislation.

Over the break I found child pornography on computers in Kingston prison. The prison said that I did not find it. Very technically it was right. What the inmates were doing on government computers and on their own computers was taking adult pornography pictures and overlaying them with children's faces. Rather than standing up and saying that it was a serious problem, that the rehabilitation thing was not working that well and that there were sex offenders getting their jollies from this kind of thing, the prison system said that was not real child pornography and that they were just overlaying pictures.

I recently finished a serious study on pornography in prisons. I am talking about trying to relate the need for better rehabilitation in the legislation and some way to force the prison system to grow up and be more responsible.

There are numerous prisons in Canada that are not only stocking Playboy and other things in their prison libraries. The inmates also have access to any kind of subscriptions they want for pornography.

How does the government reconcile tabling legislation such as this when the sex offender who is already in the prison has full 100% access to subscriptions to pornography? How do the prisons reconcile this? This stuff here is only half-baked measures. It has to go back to the courtroom. It has to go into the prisons. It has to refer to rehabilitative programs. This is so basic, so common and so natural.

What is the answer to this? I would suggest that the government take back the legislation and go back into discussions with opposition members who obviously relate to different people in Canada than the government does. There has to be something. The government cannot simply be getting its information from everybody. Virtually everyone I talk to makes constant reference to the kinds of problems I just described: the moral and the ethical crisis in our courtrooms; the inability to rehabilitate sex offenders; and the inability to address child pornography and its definition.

I am frustrated every time I come into this place these days. The government tables legislation and gets all its PR marks from telling the media that it is doing a great job, but in effect it does not have the infrastructure, the base of the problem resolved. Until it does, the legislation will not go anywhere.

[Privilege, January 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I want to address a question of privilege brought up by the member for Hochelaga—Maisonneuve, who rose on his question suggesting that I prematurely issued an unauthorized disclosure of the minority report of the Special Committee on Non-Medical Use of Drugs.

I have been accused of divulging privileged information from the parliamentary Special Committee on Non-Medical Use of Drugs, and to say the least, this is a serious charge. As vice-chairman of that committee and a former House officer, I take this charge very seriously as an affront to my own integrity. Notwithstanding any whining about the positions that anyone takes on the drug issue today, I want to state very clearly my position on his question of privilege.

There is no doubt that I have grave concerns about the government's approach to drugs, harm reduction and marijuana. However, my talking to the press does not in the least constitute any particular divulging of a report.

This is not a new charge in the House. In fact, as House leader of the official opposition I had a great deal of concern expressed in the House about leaked reports. In fact, I found in many cases, which I will disclose in a moment, that there is a bigger concern not from individual members but from ministers themselves.

I might add, however, that this is not a leaked report. My comments were likely to do with the great disgust over the government's ill-planned move toward the marijuana situation and harm reduction. My concerns and that of the nation on this issue over a move to adopt a European style of life in Canada were expressed in most Canadian newspapers. If I am guilty of such a breach in confidentiality, I will be most interested to see how it is dealt with in view of the fact that confidentiality has been breached in the House time and time again.

I have not seen any documents or any substantiation of this, by the way, so I am standing in the House defending my own position and not knowing what the actual accusations have been or how tangible they were. I can assure the House that if I feel there may have been cause to believe that I have somehow breached confidentiality by speaking out against drugs, by talking to the press about the government's misled direction of harm reduction and about encouraging young people to smoke marijuana, then I intend to bring a motion in the House this week to ensure that I be brought before the procedure and House affairs committee for investigation. I would be happy to do that.

If I myself table such a motion, I expect it to be honoured and accepted. I also expect to be able to bring counsel to that meeting and, indeed, request witnesses on my behalf, such as reporters, advocates of my position on drugs, previous ministers who have breached confidentiality, the government House leader and others to provide witness to clear up the accusations that are being made.

First off, it is up to the special committee to consider this matter, not the Speaker. However, since it has been raised in the House I do have a comment or two. I would like to explain the circumstances and precedents involved in this contempt. First with regard to precedents, apart from incorrectly raising this matter in the House instead of committee, many of the member's references are quite outdated and, I would argue, have been replaced with more current ones. The usual reference to contempt is the one from Erskine May, which describes contempt as:

--any act or omission which obstructs or impedes either House of Parliament in the performance of its functions, or which obstructs or impedes any Member or officer of such House in the discharge of his duty, or which has a tendency, directly or indirectly, to produce such results may be treated as a contempt even though there is no precedent of the offence.

I am not sure at this point whether I should go through all of the cases or not. First, I need to know what exactly I was purported to have said. Second, I would like the time to look at that and bring it back into the House. As I have said, I have the integrity inasmuch as if I feel that I have breached something I would be the first one to bring it before the procedure and House affairs committee.

Mr. Speaker, I want to reserve a lot of my comments for that instance, when we bring it back in here and you decide whether or not I have in fact breached some sort of security. I do not want to take any more of the House's time away from the important issue we are dealing with today in order to discuss any more of the possible references that may be used unless it is necessary to use them. All I can say is that when there are accusations against one's integrity in the House, I think the accusers should have the integrity to properly use the best points of reference possible, give the person accused the proof that they have, and in particular give members an opportunity to decide for themselves whether or not they have breached some form of integrity in the House.

Mr. Speaker, I leave it in your hands to decide whether or not you are willing to give me some kind of substantive documentation to show that I have in fact breached anything in the House. I would like to then return here and tell you what I think of that. I can tell you what I think already, but it would be more appropriate to wait for the real stuff to come in.

[Citizenship of Canada Act, November 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I can only speak for my area and if my area is any indication the magnitude is rather severe.

I get these cases all the time. I cannot work with all of them. The ones I work with are not necessarily individuals who have been pre-screened and have no record. They commit crimes when they come to Canada. That is the difficulty we are having here.

If they have an application for citizenship and commit crimes during the process, then the application should be gone during the process. Otherwise, individuals are coming into the country, they are committing crimes, and they are allowed to stay.

We go through a large number of deportation hearings. They are essentially a waste of time. Essentially, in all the cases I have gone through, which are numerous, hundreds of thousands dollars are spent on these cases, but yet nothing happens at the end of the day. These people end up staying in Canada and they end up citizens. That is wrong.

[Citizenship of Canada Act, November 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, it is amazing that he says it is rhetoric. I have been involved in every one of these hearings I talked about. I am involved on a daily basis. It is anything but rhetoric; it is reality.

The way to resolve this, if the government wants to build legislation on a citizenship program and wants to allow individuals to be citizens under new rules, is to make darn sure that those who should not be citizens do not remain in our country. That is the whole point.

Individuals who are not worthy of being Canadian citizens are actually becoming Canadian citizens and nothing is being done about it. If the hon. member calls that rhetoric, then he is just as bad as the guys across the way.

[Citizenship of Canada Act, November 7th, 2002]

There is not enough time, because I have case after case after case of individuals who are criminals, serious offenders, and who are still in this country after being ordered deported. They are still wreaking havoc on our society. They will eventually become citizens and then can wreak more havoc on our society.

This stuff here today is not worth the paper it is printed on unless the government starts to make some productive changes in our society in terms of kicking out people who do not deserve to be here. I feel a little better after saying that, but not much better about the government doing squat about it.

[Citizenship of Canada Act, November 7th, 2002]

That member is listening, is he?

Now let me talk about a fellow by the name of Phrasanonh. He did 14 months in the prisons in my riding for deliberately running down some young people with a car. One of these people eventually lost his life. Phrasanonh, after a long fight, was ordered deported. Not only was he ordered deported, he was ordered deported promptly. I asked the government to me know when he was to be deported, knowing full well that the chances of that were a joke. The government said it could not let me know when it was to deport him because that is privacy. We are not supposed to know that. That is a secret. I waited and I waited and, sure enough, he showed up again. He was never deported. Even though he was ordered deported, he was never deported. Where does he show up? In Abbotsford, in my community, once again on assault charges.

So what have we achieved with Mr. Phrasanonh? He does a little time, he is ordered deported and I am not allowed to know if he is deported. I have to stumble over it. I have to find out by accident that not only was he not deported, he is up for assault. So I guess he is going to stay because the government has no intestinal fortitude to do anything other than that, and he will get his citizenship eventually. Congratulations, I say, we really need him in our crowd.

There is something terribly wrong here, but I have been talking about this for 10 years. It has been 10 years and the government is listening as much today as it always did. The Liberals over there have a closed mind about the problems in our country. They are passing citizenship bills but they are not looking after the basics of our country. There are people here who should not be here. They should be moved out. They should not get citizenship. But the other side just does not give a damn. No matter how much we talk about it, it goes in one ear and out the other.

I have about one minute left to say what I think about those fellows over there.

[Citizenship of Canada Act, November 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to speak to Bill C-18 today. Based on personal experience, I have a lot of things to say about citizenship and immigration but I want to talk about two specific things today.

I want to talk about one particular aspect of the bill. The reasons why citizenship applications could be refused are in the bill, but the fact that citizenship applications would not be terminated if a person broke the law before the conditions were fulfilled really would be a mistake for this country. I want to talk about two cases I am working on right now. Since I have been a member of Parliament, I have been an intervener in something like seven or eight criminal cases and at the Immigration and Refugee Board. Those people have been deported.

I am currently working on two situations. Both of these situations involve individuals staying in Canada and eventually getting citizenship. The first case is that of an American wanted in the United States on drug charges. He has come to Canada and has applied for refugee status, which is unheard of in this country. The refugee board is giving him a hearing. I applied to become an intervener in this case in order to fight it. I had the most difficult time trying to get into this hearing, because I am Canadian, for one thing, and also because the individual said he did not want me at this application hearing. The decision was up to him, not me, which is incredible to say the least.

The individual is claiming that he has been persecuted in the United States because of its drug laws, so he is claiming refugee status in Canada. In his mind, it is not prosecution but persecution. Hon. members can imagine the outcome of this application if he wins it. Basically everybody in the United States who is wanted on drug charges could apply to Canada for refugee status, have a hearing and get it.

The consequences of this are very severe indeed. I cannot understand the government on the other side actually acquiescing to some form of protest from an individual from another country, in particular the United States, because he does not happen to like the laws. If this individual wins, not only do we have somebody here who is running from the United States because he does not like the drug laws, but he will in fact become a citizen of Canada. The hearing will take place, so that part of it is a done deal. Let us hope this is not a done deal behind closed doors, because if it is we will have one heck of a lot of Americans applying to come into this country.

As it happens, I found out just recently that this same individual, a non-citizen in our country, applied for a certificate for medical use of marijuana. There are all kinds of people in this country looking for certificates for medical marijuana. What happened? Because of the ingenuity of the other side, he got the certificate. Not only did he get a certificate to carry, grow and smoke marijuana, and as an American citizen no less, he is permitted to grow 59 plants and store up to 2.6 kilos, enough to keep 20 people going for a month.

I do not understand the government. I do not understand the logic. I do not understand the stupidity across the way. I do not understand why we cannot intervene in cases like this. I do not understand why Americans get to claim refugee status in this country. Americans do not understand why Americans can claim refugee status in this country.

But we are not going to get an answer here and we are not going to get an answer under Bill C-18. Basically it states that if one applies for citizenship one will get it, with the exception that once in a while an application may be refused. The bottom line on all of this activity is that nobody quite understands what the heck is going on in this place, much less in the citizenship hearings, the immigration hearings and the refugee board hearings.

I know I am talking to myself here, because no one over there is listening--